Aurora was a gold camp in the first flush of its prosperity. The town was built in a gulch, below which lie narrow, crooked cañons. The history of the camp, in its essential aspects, parallels that of a dozen others. Its first inhabitants were hard-working prospectors, prosaic grubbers who respected each other’s rights and lent a kindly hand to the neighbour in the next-door tent. But after the “glory hole” was struck and the population began to climb came an influx of parasites—gamblers, desperadoes, and road agents. A small percentage of the population, they leavened the whole. Down Virgin Cañon, by stage or on horseback, came John Daily, James Masterson, Sam Dutch, William Buckley, and John McDowell, alias Three-Fingered Jack. They were the advance guard of a hundred others of like mind, hard-visaged “man eaters” whose trigger fingers always itched. They made Aurora sit up on its hind legs and howl. Two rival gangs operated, one from San Francisco, the other from Sacramento. Between them they ran the town. There was a reign of lawlessness. Juries were afraid to convict. Judges and sheriffs were timid about pushing cases. Sam Dutch, king of the killers, boasted that he was chief. He was suspicious of everybody and never sat except with his back to a wall. In the evening he always saw that the curtains were down. He was for ever watching for the inevitable hour when some other bad man would challenge his supremacy and perhaps cut short his career. This suspense increased his deadliness. He could not afford to wait for an even break because he could not fathom an opponent’s mind and know just when he might elect to draw steel. Wherefore, like the rest of his kind, he killed unnecessarily without provocation. His theory was that dead men are harmless. When Hugh knew that Dutch was in town he prepared for the trouble he foresaw. Every day he practised with his navy revolver when he was up in the hills with his woodchoppers. Every night in his cabin he carefully oiled and loaded the weapon. He, too, improvised curtains of gunny sacks for the window. When he went down Main Street he had eyes in the back of his head. For he knew that Dutch would assassinate him if possible. Winter hangs on long at Aurora. There is no spring. The dry, torrid summer with its parching heat follows on the heels of frost. When Hugh arrived in June the cañons still held banked the winter snow. By the middle of July the gulch was a bakeshop. It was late afternoon one sultry day when Hugh walked down the crooked business street of the town. He stopped in the shadow cast by the false front of a store. A dog up Virgin Gulch was howling monotonously. A long, lank man, carelessly dressed, sat in a chair tilted back against the wall. One of his heels was hooked in a rung of the chair. “If I owned a half-interest in that dog,” he drawled lazily, “I believe I’d kill my half.”